SSA study of early polyethylenes degradation stages. Effects of attack rate, of average branch length, and of backbone polymethylene sequences length distributions

Monitoring polymer degradation under different conditions in the marine environment

“…These results are in accordance with the ones obtained related to weight loss in this work and previous studies that indicate that sediments could have a favourable effect on degradation since they harbour higher microbial densities than other environments such as the water column (Middleburg et al, 1993;Euleber et al, 2010). The higher values of CI obtained for the material D can be related to higher rates of degradation of the amorphous fraction of the material in comparison with materials A and B as it was expected since the crystalline areas are reported to be the last to be degraded (Perez et al, 2013). The higher values of CI for material D were obtained at 365 days under marine sediment conditions indicating that the sediment is a suitable source for PLA degradation being these results in accordance with other works (Emadian et al, 2017).…”

Microstructure Characterization of Oceanic Polyethylene Debris

“…Plastic photodegradation leads to structural modification of the polymer backbone, such as oxidation with the formation of carbonyl groups 17 , chain scission, radical recombination and crosslinking 18 . Polymer photodegradation also leads to morphological alterations; the macromolecules can reorganize, and the crystallinity of the plastic often increases 19 . These physical transformations impact the mechanical properties of the material and favour breakdown and embrittlement 20 .…”

“…18 Polymer photodegradation also leads to morphological alterations; the macromolecules can reorganize, and the crystallinity of the plastic often increases. 19 These physical transformations impact the mechanical properties of the material and favor breakdown and embrittlement. 20 Cracking, surface erosion, and abrasion lead to the formation of μPs and NPs.…”

Non-Negligible Effect of Additives in the Application of Successive Self-Nucleation and Annealing Fractionation for Microstructure Characterization of Matrix Resin in Additive-Containing Samples

“…They emphasized that only by using T s,ideal as the T s,1 could the real structural information of the sample be obtained. Due to the outstanding merits of easy-to-handle operation, low cost, free from the solvent, and short time consumption, SSA is widely used to characterize the chain structure of semicrystalline polymers and compare the structures of similar series of polymers. ,,− For example, Chang et al found that SSA could well characterize the structure of not only the polymers synthesized by the Ziegler–Natta catalyst but also the ones synthesized by the metallocene catalyst. Virkkunen et al utilized SSA to investigate the stereodefect distribution in isotactic polypropylene with different isotacticities and found the fractionation results obtained by SSA were in good agreement with those measured by TREF.…”